The Changing World
and
Lectures to Theosophical Students

The Changing World
and
Lectures to Theosophical
Students

Fifteen Lectures delivered in London during
May, June, and July 1909

by
Annie Besant
President of the Theosophical Society

Chicago, Ill.
The Theosophical Book Concern
Room 426, 26 Van Buren Street

London, Eng.: The Theosophical Publishing Society
1910

Contents

Part I
Lectures to the Public

The Changing World

Lecture I
The Deadlock in Religion, Science, and Art

Friends: if you stand on the seashore when the tide is flowing inwards, and if you watch the waves as they ripple up, one after another, each coming a little further than its predecessor, each in turn breaking and making way for its follower—in the inflowing tide you have a picture of the evolving races of mankind. And if you watch the method of the flow, you will notice that that which is the most prominent at the moment is not the one which creeps furthest up the sands. The wave which is breaking into foam, which is rippling over the pebbles, which throws up the broken water, which falls back on to the land and makes music, sound, melody as it breaks—that is the wave which is nearly over; it is the wave whose course is run. But if you watch you will notice that while your attention was caught by the noise of the breaking wave, by the foam of the billow that was almost over, silently, imperceptibly almost, visible only to the eye that watches, another wave is rising behind it, silently, without break, without noise, without attracting attention; but the wave that is rising silently behind the breaker—that is the wave which will follow on the billow that has broken, and will run further up the sands than the breaking wave had gone.

In that familiar picture, which every child who has gone to the seaside knows so well, is a figure of the great tide of evolution, in which races are waves and the ocean humanity itself. And each great wave—the great wave that comes at intervals—is a race, and the smaller waves that come between are the sub-races which the race bears. Just as with the water, so with humanity: as one sub-wave is breaking, having reached its highest point, another is rising silently behind it, which shall rule the world when the breaking wave has spent its force. Then, from time to time, to those who have eyes to see, on the crest of the breaking wave appears the mighty angel that we call the Spirit of the Age, and his feet are on the wave, and his locks mingle with the rays of the sun, and he cries out in a voice of thunder: Behold I make a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness shall dwell.

In such a day, in such a time, we of the present age are living. The wave of the sub-race to which we all belong, or nearly all of us, that is breaking on the shore of time; the wave behind it of the race that shall be, to whom the new heaven and the new earth shall be a habitation—that is the race which is coming to the birth, which, in its turn, shall rule this changing earth. For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. Behind us, the long centuries through which the great Aryan race has been sending out wave after wave of humanity in successive billows, sweeping over Asia and over Europe, one after another rising, growing, ruling, and then passing to its fall. During all the time of a sub-race, the world rolls down what have been called the grooves of change, steadily, quietly, without much of jolt or of trouble; the wheels running fairly smoothly, continuously, with little of shock. And then, again, the time comes when a new sub-race must be born, when another shall succeed and the old shall pass away.

If you look around you now, on every side you will see the signs of a closing age; thoughts which have reached a point beyond which they cannot continue on the old lines and in the old methods, that which I have called a deadlock; in all the most important departments of human thought and human activity, rapid, extraordinarily rapid, growth. The changes which the elder amongst us have seen are marvellous exceedingly, change succeeding change, and each change greater than the one before it, until the whole of society seems to be rushing onwards swiftly without a pause, and men wonder what the next thought will be, what the next development will forebode.

It is not, of course, for the first time in human history that such a period as this has come upon the world. Look back to the time when the sub-race preceding the Teutonic was at the zenith of its power, and see then how troubled were the minds of men. It was the time that was marked by the birth of Him who is known in western lands as the Christ—a period of swift transition like our own, of marked and sudden changes. And if to the people of that day you had said, as I am now saying to you: “You are in one of the great transition periods of the world’s history; the race that is dominant and imperial is really reaching its zenith, and after the zenith comes the slow descent, inevitable, sure”; if you had said to the people of the time that among them would come a mighty Teacher who should revolutionise the future world and change the very foundations of civilisation; who should change the type of religion for the foremost races of the world; who should lift up a different ethical code, and make that virtuous which before had been despised, and that which had been looked down upon the topmost crown of saintship—if to the people of that day you had spoken such words, they would have laughed at you as dreamer or threatened you as madman. For why should the world change on its appointed ways, and why should the feet of the world seek to tread new and untrodden paths? And yet there were many who felt a change was coming; yet there were prophets and seers who spoke of a coming kingdom and a coming Teacher, and changes which should alter the face of the world. Of little use to look back to those far-off times if you repeat in your own day the blindness of the people then; for surely in these two thousand years men should have learned something more of wisdom, their eyes should have gained something more of insight, and the signs of a closing age should be more palpable to them than in the days of their forerunners in the closing age of Rome.

Even at that time a future was spoken of where changes should again occur, where a great Teacher should again appear, where a new age should be born, a new heaven and a new earth should be seen. It is in that next transition age, then, that you and I are standing; and although many of you may say, as they would have said of old, that I am a dreamer or am mad, none the less will I strive to tell you this evening, and the Sundays that follow, something of the signs by which you may judge for yourselves whether a great change is not coming over the world, whether there is not coming a new kingdom and a mighty Teacher, whether in our days again, as in the days of the past, the world is not to take on a new form and a nobler type of humanity to live and rule on earth, for many are the signs of the age that is closing, and many the signs also of the day that is dawning upon earth. In this and in the following lecture we shall be dealing with the dying, not the race which is to be born; and if in some ways, therefore, these two lectures may seem a little gloomy or a little grey, then I would remind you that the night must come before the dawn, and the greyness of the sky before the sunrising. If we can see behind the greyness the first faint gleams of the rose-tipped fingers of the dawn, ah! then we need not mind that the night is still with us, for the night is closing, and we, the children of the day, shall see the rising of the sun.

I have taken for this evening three great departments of human thought—Religion, Science, Art; and our task now is to see whether, looking over the world of religion, of science, and of art, we can find that the old methods have carried us as far as we can go, that they are breaking in our hands, that we no longer can use them for opening up new vistas of thought and hope for man. On every side there is a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling, I might almost say, of distress; a questioning what is truth, what is reliable? where can we find some rock on which we may put our feet amid all the buffeting of various opinions, of doubt, nay, of scepticism and unbelief?

I.—Religion.

What is the position of the religious world to-day? First of all, there have been working in it now for many long years certain forces undermining the religion of the time; and when I speak now of religion, I mean the religion of the West, for I am speaking in the West; although I might show you that in other parts of the world as well the same forces are at work, though not quite so prominently, and have brought about there to some extent the same results. Now, it is not from the mouth of a Theosophist like myself that I would ask you to take the testimony as to the difficulties in which the religious world finds itself to-day, and on the most important points of which I shall touch, after drawing your attention to the destructive forces that have been undermining religion, I shall take my testimony from bishop and from clergyman in their published writings, which all may read who will. The undermining forces that I allude to are chiefly three, and each destructive; the absence of construction is one of the signs of the day that is closing. First, as you know well, the undermining which has been done by scholarship in Christendom, in which what is called the higher criticism has been tearing to pieces the documents on which historical Christianity has been built up—taking one after another, examining, studying, scrutinising, comparing one kind of language with another kind in the same document; pointing out marks of different ages where a single writer was supposed to have been speaking, and gradually collecting from all sides different readings, placing them side by side, and finding them to a very great extent mutually destructive. So far has that gone, as you know, that, not so very long ago, the whole of this line of investigation was condemned by the authoritative head of the great Roman Catholic communion. The higher criticism, the historical dealing with Church teaching and Church history, the analysing, scrutinising, investigating spirit of our own time—the whole of that, with all its results, has been condemned and forbidden to be taught within the teaching establishments of the great Roman communion; the results of historical criticism have been banned, and, most fatal of all policies, kept largely out of the knowledge of those who are to become the teachers of the generations that are to be born. Is there any wonder, if you look at it only from the outside point? For where religion is a matter of authority, of books, of successions, of historical events, there criticism must always destroy; the form changes, and cannot remain stable in a transitory world, and we find the ancient documents shorn of their ancient value; we find inspiration, limited and fettered to words instead of the spirit, failing to hold its own against the critical scholarship of the day. One defence after another is thrown up, only to be abandoned before the approaching tide, as children throw up castles in the sand, dreaming that sand castles can stop the flow of waves. You know, on every side questions have arisen in regard to documents; most disheartening and discouraging if religion were a matter of books and words, and not a matter of the living and divine spirit in man, which no criticism is able to destroy. For, out of it all, thought arises and all criticism itself has birth. But, for the moment, in that tearing to pieces of the documents, one great inroad is made on the religion of the time.

Then, if you turn to another destructive force that has been undermining popular religion, you find it in archæological research; you find it in what is called comparative mythology, built up out of the results of that research; unburied cities, unburied libraries, unburied tombs—they have all given up their longhidden secrets, and those secrets have been used as weapons against the religion of the West. Dates have been thrown overboard, hundreds of years have been lengthened into millions; archæology, geology, antiquarianism of every kind, researches into long-dead races have all given the same result, shaking the very foundations on which it was thought, however wrongly, that religion must be built. Out of all this undermining, this destruction, from the continuously critical spirit of man, have arisen doubt and question and half-scepticism, and only a hope instead of a knowledge, only an aspiration instead of a living faith. And beyond those minor questions of religion which can be touched by this kind of destructive criticism, beyond and above those, the central ideas of religion have been thrown into the Crucible of Reason. The idea of God Himself has been under discussion, argued about, reasoned about, and the conception of God has changed. Who now dreams of troubling himself much about Butler’s Analogy? Who now would spend his time poring over Paley’s Evidence? These are out of date, and they do not deal with the questions of the time; for the thought of Evolution has affected religion, and the central conception of Deity has not been able to escape the corrosion of that atmosphere of thought. Here, again, outward demonstrations are failing, outward reasonings fail to satisfy. Reason, though piled upon reason, can give no more than a reasonable probability, so long as you watch for God only in the outer world, and not in His highest manifestation, the Spirit which lives in yourself. The idea of an extra-cosmic God is gradually disappearing from the world of thought. The idea of a God who made the universe as a piece of machinery, and stood outside it while the wheels were turning and the bands were working—that idea has almost passed away; and instead of that a God immanent in everything, a God who is a life and not a mechanician, a God who is an informing Spirit and not an outside creator—that nobler, more exquisite idea is dawning on the religious world to-day. But still, to see Him only immanent in the universe, that is not the final answer of religion; there is something more that is needed than the God who is found within the universe and within man, that mighty truth which is spoken out in an Eastern scripture: “I established this universe with a portion of Myself, and I remain.” That is one of the new avenues of thought, of escape from the destructive forces of the thought that we are considering.

Along another of the great Christian concepts there is much of trouble and of difficulty to-day. I take here, for a moment, one of a series of remarkable articles that appeared in the Hibbert Journal for January last, one perhaps of the finest numbers that have been issued, dealing with this question of the time. One of these articles has a strange title which marks out the crux of many a mind to-day; the title is, “Jesus or Christ?”; not “Jesus Christ,” not “Jesus and Christ,” but “Jesus or Christ?”; natural enough if it were written by a Theosophist, but this is written by a minister of a Christian church, and he confesses, with wonderful candour and boldness, the difficulties that all must face who are dealing on the one side with a spiritual ideal and on the other with a man. He asks whether the claims made are on behalf of a spiritual ideal, to which provisionally the word “Christ” may be applied, or are they predicated of Jesus; he then goes through a number of these difficulties (many of you would do well to read the article at your leisure), pointing out in how many cases in the New Testament you come across limitations, acceptance of the thought of the time, and many other difficulties which clash with the idea that this was Very God of Very God. “No condemnation,” he points out, “in the Sermon on the Mount is passed on the harsh and cruel law of debtor and creditor, nor would efforts for legal reform find any encouragement from the words attributed to the Master here. On non-resistance and oath-taking the rule attributed to Jesus is absolute. Yet, as a whole, Christendom has openly violated it throughout its history.” He then speaks of the view which is taken of man in relation to woman, of the “iniquitous principle of sex-inferiority as against woman,” a principle that “has inflicted infinite suffering on half of the human race.” And so he goes on, taking up point after point, and declaring that this conclusion can no longer be avoided—that to identify Jesus with Christ is to “make God a Being who is omnipotent, yet limited in power; omniscient, yet defective in knowledge; infinitely good, yet One who declines ‘to turn any part of His knowledge as God into science for man.’ … It would be an abuse of language to say that this is a mystery. It is flat contradiction.” Now when a clergyman can write like that in a publication that goes almost exclusively among the educated classes, you can realise how great is the difficulty which is confronting modern thought with regard to the personality of Jesus and the larger revelation of the Christ.

It is not possible that questions like this can remain always unanswered, that they should ever be asked and no reply be found; Christendom inevitably must work its way to some reasonable solution, and find how in that marvellous personality there was a divine revelation as men have hoped and believed, and how there is an answer, although orthodoxy as yet may not be prepared to give it. And if you pass from religion proper, as we may say, to the great domain of morals which is so closely bound up with it, see how difficult is the position at the present time. Now, since I was last here in London, you have had a Moral Education Congress, to which no less than twenty-two of the European Governments sent their best representatives. Intense interest was felt in the question of education as part of religion or apart from it. It is one of the most serious social questions of the day, one which society must answer: Shall morals be based on religion and sanctioned by religion, or can they find standing ground apart from, separate from it? Now, the ordinary popular answer of the day is rather in favour of the second—that morals should find an independent ground apart from the sanction of religion. And that is not unnatural, because the quarrels of religious bodies, their disputes over the question of education, have practically wearied the mind of England, and men and women get impatient with the struggles over trivialities where the moral training of tens of thousands of boys and girls, the future citizens of the country, is concerned. If you take that Moral Education Congress, the point was put very strongly and very plainly. Here, again, in this number of the Hibbert that I am dealing with, we find a very brief article speaking of that and of the relation of education to religion; and the writer speaks of one remarkable speech at the Education Congress, in which it was declared that while children should be taught “the respect due to the idea of religion … they are to be taught that the chief mode of honouring God consists in each doing his duty according to his conscience and his reason.” Now that is a statement that would find very wide acceptance at the present day, and yet its value or its lack of value depends on two words, “conscience” and “reason.” If the conscience be unenlightened, there will be very little useful service done to man by the boys and girls who follow that conscience as men and women. The enlightened conscience is truly the foundation of a State, but the unenlightened may lead men into every kind of crime. The inquisitor followed his conscience when he racked the heretic and sent him to the stake. Laud followed his conscience when he persecuted, tortured, mutilated Puritans who would not bow before him. Conscience has committed the greatest crimes against nations and against individuals; conscience must be enlightened before it is a safe guide. And so also with reason. If the reason is developed, illuminated, cultured, trained, that reason might indeed, be followed along the path of life; but a reason that is not exercised according to the laws of logic and right thinking may be as irrational as though the name of reason were not applied to it. It is not enough to teach that men should follow conscience and reason unless you train the reason and illuminate the conscience.

Now, how is that to be done? It has been done in the past by religion to a very great extent. Can society afford to try to teach morals apart from religion? Difficulties naturally arise here, and the Bishop of Tasmania has very bravely drawn the attention of the empire to the difficulty which is in the face of religious teaching. He points out that the Old Testament is not a book which, as a whole, can be used for the instruction in morals of the Christian child. Can the Old Testament, he asks, be used in that way? and the answer is in the negative. He points out that you can find in the Old Testament magnificent moral passages and splendid moral inspiration, but that is by a process of selection, in which you apply the moral conscience to discrimination in ancient writings. Bishop as he is, he is brave enough to declare that the Old Testament as a whole ought not to find its place in the education of the child. Now, suppose that we admit—and most thoughtful people would admit—that you must select and choose carefully, that is not a sufficient answer to the question. Can you effectively teach the child morals without falling back upon religion? Are you prepared to admit that you can teach a certain class of virtues without religious sanction; not those which are the favourite virtues, we may say, of the present day of competition and of struggle? You can teach a child to be prudent, thrifty, cautious; you can teach him the value of acquisitiveness, and the duty of providing for the future. All that kind of virtue you may be able to teach on a purely utilitarian ground, as it is called, but, as is again pointed out in a remarkably able article on “The Social Conscience of the Future,” certain old-fashioned traits, once considered to be virtues, are now commonly accounted to men for vices. Non-resistance, for example, “is now considered cowardice; meekness to-day is usually spelt weakness; taking no thought for the morrow is known as improvidence; unworldliness is generally viewed as a phase of sentimentality.” That is all quite true. But how are you going to teach the virtues that hitherto have been rooted in religion—virtues without which no State can endure? For you cannot teach the civic virtues on a basis of enlightened selfishness. That is a point that all educators of the young must remember. Self-sacrifice, compassion, the willingness to endure for the sake of others, the taking of the burden of the weak on the shoulders that are strong, the realisation that duty is greater than rights, and responsibility more vital than self-protection—how are you going to teach those virtues on the basis of selfishness? Now I have argued that in the old days, and have tried to show, in the time when I was a sceptic, that you might train people to self-sacrifice and self-surrender by an appeal to the humanity within them, and the sense of duty to the race; but that appeal fails the most readily in the cases where the virtues are most required.

It appeals to the noble, but the majority are not noble; it appeals to the unselfish and the heroic, but the majority are of mediocre courage and of very limited unselfishness; it appeals to those who do not need it, and it leaves cold and unmoved those who need it most. Will you go to the millionaire who has built up his vast fortune by the ruin of hundreds of families, and speak to him of the beauty of self-sacrifice and the splendour of self-surrender? The answer of people of the selfish type is: Why should I sacrifice myself for the future? or, as the witty Frenchman put it: “What has posterity done for me that I should sacrifice myself for posterity?” You may say that is very mean, very selfish. It is; but then, those are the people who want the compulsory force of moral strength applied to them. Where are you going to find it? For without self-sacrifice no society is secure; without self-surrender of the small to the great, of the individual to the social self, there is no possibility of national life, no stability in the social system; and those are virtues that grow out of religion, not out of what is falsely called utility. The greatest utility for the nation is that which understands the relationship between the part and the whole, and that is only taught by religion which knows the larger Self, which knits man to the whole, makes him realise relationships, makes him know he is not a creature of one little globe, but a creature of the universe; that he is a cosmic life, and not a planetary. That is learned by religion only, and by the deathless immortality of the divine Spirit in man; without that, no morality will endure; and you will make a fatal blunder if, because of the passing follies of religionists, you throw religion out of its place in education, of which it is the inspiration and the strength.

These are some of the problems you have to deal with in this deadlock, as I have called it, of religion. In fact, you want a new religious and moral synthesis; and you cannot find that without the higher inspiration for which man is groping now.

II.—Science.

Let us leave that deadlock—(I will try to solve it in another lecture)—and let us take the deadlock in science. Now that is very curious at the present time. Science is essentially in the West, as it is everywhere, a matter of observation, of measurement, of estimating quantities and understanding relations. But our science is coming to the end of its powers along these lines in a very curious and marked way. It cannot get its apparatus more delicate than it has got it; its balances are marvels, measuring inappreciable parts of an almost inappreciable grain. Nothing more exquisite than the delicacy of scientific apparatus, nothing more a testimony to the accuracy of the scientific mind. And yet how the apparatus is failing the scientist! how his observations are becoming increasingly difficult! What can he do with the atom? The chemist, the physicist, can he follow the atom and make that still a matter of observation, or does it wholly escape him? is the chemist, the physicist, now obliged to turn to the mathematician to make for him an atom which will answer the demands of the science which is unable to discover it for itself? All the later arguments on the atom, if you notice, are based on mathematical formulæ; they cannot observe; it is too fine, delicate, minute—it escapes them. Even the chemical atom, which is four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, is a matter on which they are compelled to reason because they cannot observe. But a science which reasons without those reasons being based on observations is no science as the West has known it up to the present time. All scientific reasoning is supposed to be based on observation; and if, instead of that, scientists have to fall back on reason where observation fails them, then a new method must be discovered, and new ways must be trodden. I do not say there is no new method; I do not say there are not new ways; but they are not the methods and the ways of the science of our own time. And there comes in this difficulty: the minute is escaping science by its minuteness, the subtle is too subtle for its investigation. If that be true—and it is true of chemistry and physics, and true also to a very great extent of electricity—we find that all the sciences are coming up to the borderland in which their methods fail them, and their senses no longer answer to the delicacy of the waves that beat upon them from the outer world. They are leaving behind them the gross and the dense; that is conquered, it is theirs; the subtle and the rare, those escape them; and the instruments of brass, of glass, nay, even of sensitive needles, they are not fine enough nor subtle enough to carry investigation further.

In other realms of science the same difficulties are arriving. Psychology—where have all the facts of the new psychology come from? From scientific men? Not a bit of it! From frauds and charlatans, from mesmerists and spiritualists and theosophists, and all these “ists” that popular science looks down upon and says are entirely outside the pale of scientific respect. And yet from these they gather their facts, from these they are obliged to take the strange new psychological facts that are revolutionising all the ideas of consciousness and the powers which lie hidden in the human mind. Those facts are accumulating from the hands of all these improper people, and when science gets them it cannot explain them. It can only rearrange them and rename them, and call mesmerism “hypnotism,” and clairvoyance “autoscopy.” But all that relabelling and all that rearranging cannot veil the fundamental fact that it has no theory into which these facts can fit, and no explanation which arranges them in a rational order. In psychology, as in chemistry, physics, and electricity, there is a deadlock.

And medicine, what about that? Doctors are beginning to think less and less of drugs. In my young days an honest doctor once told me that he sometimes gave coloured water and bread pills to people whom he knew would get on much better if they did not have drugs, but they were so determined to have them that he was obliged to give them something so he gave them harmless things. That idea has grown. Doctors have less and less faith in drugs, and they admit more and more widely that their medical science is very largely a hand-to-mouth thing, empirical, based on no true theory—experimental, as they say. But, in despair of finding the right road to health, they have gone down the terrible byway of Vivisection, trying to wring from Nature, by the torture of her more helpless children, the secrets which otherwise they were unable to find. But that is a fatal road; it is leading medicine further and further away from any true science of healing, and is turning it into a science of poisoning instead; medicine is becoming a matter of balancing one poison against another, so that in the middle of the balanced poisons you may be able to get some miserable remnant of health. When doctors find something they do not understand, they say: “Oh, let us try it on an animal; better try it on an animal than a man.” Yes; but if the animal does not give the same result, and if that which is poison to man is not poison to the animal, then the results of your experiment may be a widespread, unintentional poisoning added to the intentional poisonings of the day. There comes in one danger, that perhaps may make people rather less ready to take the results of vivisection. Take henbane: goats feed quite comfortably on henbane; it would kill you. If, when people wanted to know the effects of henbane on the human system, they tried it on goats, many human deaths would have followed on the result of that particular use of the experimental method. What is being done with all these miserable results of this mistaken and blinded science, all these serums and toxins, and all the rest of the things which they are now pouring into the human body? They are lowering the vitality of the race; they are diminishing the disease-resisting power of the man. I do not say that you cannot make a man immune for a time by slowly poisoning him, so that when a dose of the poison comes it will have no effect. You can do it with arsenic; you can put so much arsenic into a human body that the arsenic-poisoned person can take a dose of arsenic without death. Do you tell me that is health? I say it is disease, and that all these miserable methods are lowering the vitality of the human body, and making it a prey to innumerable diseases under the pretence of saving it from a few. Health is not got by poisonings, however carefully graduated. Health is brought about by pure living, pure food, moral self-control, and by becoming the master and not the slave of your appetites and passions. It is a road that leads to death, and not to life, when you want to live evilly, and be cured of the results of evil living out of the things which are wrung from the tortured bodies of the animal kingdom. And so there again there is a deadlock, for even the vivisectionists are beginning to be a little afraid of the results that they have drawn from their investigations. There are answers to the problems of disease, but they do not lie along this line.

III.—Art.

What of art? Now, very many people, I am afraid, in this and other countries, do not realise that beauty is a necessity of daily life for the human being, and when he does not get it he is less man, less woman, than he ought to be. It is not a question as to whether you should have a beautiful thing as a luxury; it is a necessity, and it should be the daily bread of life. Nations which knew the value of beauty made their towns beautiful; their works of art were made common property, their buildings were exquisitely proportioned, their architecture magnificent, and out of all that, open always to the masses of the people, grew a beauty of form and a beauty of mind that cannot possibly grow up in a nation where the towns are allowed to be hideous, where the air is poisoned, and where all the common things of life are ugly instead of beautiful. There is one thing in India that I have often complained of; it will not strike you here so much as it would inevitably strike you there. The old Indian life was a life full of beauty. Even now, out in the villages, life is beautiful. The garments of men and women alike are graceful, flowing, exquisite in colour. If you see an Indian peasant woman working in the fields she is a picture to paint, for the grace of her drapery, for the beauty of the colours that she wears; and if you see her going to the village well to draw water, she will carry on her head some vessel, it may be of beaten bronze or copper, it may be of kneaded clay, it will always be beautiful in form and exquisite in colour, Nowadays, since our civilisation has spread its power through India, things are changing; aniline dyes are replacing vegetable dyes; kerosene oil tins are replacing the exquisite vessels of the older days. In the old days in a village, when there was a wedding, every house contributed some of its beautiful vessels for the village festival; but now those have been cast aside, and miserable tin vessels take their place. It is only a small thing, you may say; I assure you it is a very great thing; for to kill out the sense of beauty which comes by living in contact with Nature—for Nature is beautiful everywhere, and contact with her beautifies the human face and form and mind—the killing-out of that sense of beauty which grows out of the mountains and the rivers, and the meadows and the groves, that is a national loss, and spells national decay. The garden cities you are beginning to build, those are not mere fancies of fanciful people, but a wise attempt to get the people out of the hideousness of bricks and mortar as they are used in England, into the country, where life still is fair, and where sunshine and colour are supreme. The life is poor where there is no beauty, and life itself grows common, vulgar, where beauty is not a dominating force. It is one of the great revelations of God Himself, for beauty lies in perfection of harmony, in exquisiteness of outline, in loveliness of colour, and all those things are characteristics of the Divine Workman, whose manifestation is always in beauty, while wisdom and power underlie it. You may see it in your own works of art. They are not creative but imitative, and that is the sign that art along that line has reached its ending and must find a new inspiration. Sometimes people say you cannot improve upon Nature; but you can show them what there is in Nature which the blinded eyes of ordinary people do not see. Take a flower: true, the flower is beautiful; a little nature-spirit made it, and caught as much of the divine thought of beauty as that small intelligence was able to conceive; do you tell me that when the artist comes the divine life is not far more largely evolved in him than in that little nature-spirit, that he cannot catch more of God’s thought in the flower than the nature-spirit was able to express? And that is what the great painter, poet, musician does; he hears and sees and tells the thoughts of God more fully than you and I can do with our dull ears and our limited vision and our clumsy tongues. It is there, but we cannot see it. The artist is the revealer of the divine beauty in form, and unless he can do that he is no true artist at all. The artist has yet to come to this civilisation—the man who can see through the forms of the present the divine idea which is striving to express itself in new ideals, new hopes, new powers. These are wanted for art, and these shall come in the days that are dawning; and a new art shall be found in the new heavens and the new earth.

So, although I have taken you to-day along a dreary path—for I have been speaking of the passing, and not the coming—it is because I want you to realise in the signs of the world around you that you are in the midst of a closing age; not only that you may know it—that is little—but that out of the knowledge of the closing you may prepare for the race which is to be born. For unless you understand, you cannot guide your steps aright; unless you understand, the world will be a mere puzzle, and not an expression of the divine thought. The age that is closing has done its work, has trained the concrete mind, has trained the scientific thought, has developed power and strength and energy—all good gifts of God, to be used for nobler purposes than they are used for to-day. There is nothing to regret, nothing to be sorry for, nothing to wish otherwise in the world that is dying. It has done its work; but it is ours to come out of the dying world into a world that is new, and it is out of the dying into the coming world that I would fain try to lead your thoughts, and perhaps your lives as well.

Lecture II
The Deadlock in Social Conditions: Luxury and Want Face to Face

Friends: I am to speak to you to-night on a subject which is a little outside our ordinary theosophical lectures. The Theosophist, as a rule, studies and talks about causes more than effects, concerning himself more with the getting rid of the causes of misery than with the effects that grow out of those causes and show themselves as particular forms of misery. Because of that he is sometimes called unpractical. But that is a misuse of words; for to understand the causes of misery and to remove them is far more practical than cutting off the tops of the weeds while you allow the roots to remain underground to reproduce new weeds to-morrow. To say that study with the discussion which grows out of it is unpractical is very much as though you declared that it was a practical thing to send out nurses and doctors to a field of battle to cut off limbs that had been shattered and to nurse the cripples back to health, and denied that to try to remove the causes of war was practical. Now, I admit that sending out nurses and doctors is a practical thing, but I allege that to work for the substitution of arbitration for war is a great deal more practical. So with the particular things with which I am to deal to-night. I am dealing with effects, but only with a view to lead you on to the study of causes, and to the fundamental changes that will have to be made in the building up of a greater and nobler civilisation. Part of the way to turn men’s minds in that direction, and to give them the necessary impulse of working for the higher and the greater, is to show them the intolerable nature of conditions among which we are living to-day. In doing that, I am by no means going astray from the teaching and the example of that great and misunderstood woman to whom I owe all that is happiest and best in my life, H. P. Blavatsky. Some of you who are students of Theosophy may remember that in her Key to Theosophy she speaks about the misery of the East End of London, and utters words of praise for the attempts which were being made to change it. She did a good deal more than speak words of praise; for one day, after I had been telling her of some of the piteous sights that I was seeing day by day as member of the London School Board, as it was then, for the East End of London, I had on the following morning a little characteristic note, in which she enclosed a couple of sovereigns, saying: “You know I am only a pauper, but give these to the little children who asked you yesterday for a flower.” Similarly, that quick sympathy with human suffering came out in an instance in which very few of us, perhaps, would be prepared to follow her example. She was going to America, and only had just money enough to buy her ticket across; she bought it, and on the wharf she saw a crying woman with some little children. She asked why they were distressed, and the woman told how she had bought bogus tickets from some scamp, and so could not go across the ocean to join her husband. H. P. B. walked back to the ticket office, got her first-class ticket changed for steerage tickets for herself and that unfortunate woman and children, and passed the voyage in the steerage part of an Atlantic liner—a very practical proof of the brotherhood which she proclaimed. So that, after all, I am not really going very far apart in taking up this particular subject of human misery and human suffering, showing you, what I dare say you know well enough, some of the cases which should stimulate to action. And if you say to me: It is an old story that you are telling us; then my answer to you will be that until the evils are remedied it is necessary to repeat the story over and over again.

Now let us look over this great civilisation, and see what I have called “The Deadlock in Social Conditions.” First let us remember, as a kind of preliminary atmosphere, that the great civilisations of the past have perished from this startling contrast of luxury and misery, and that what has happened over and over again in the past might quite well repeat itself amongst us to-day. For we are no stronger in our civilisation than were the civilisations of Rome, of Assyria, of Egypt; and we find in the Egyptian civilisation just the same sort of questions arising then as arise now, as though the world really had not progressed in this respect. In some of the unburied tablets and sculptures we find an edict about the wages of the workpeople, and how they were to be told not to be discontented, and not to refuse to work because they were dissatisfied with the amount of wage that they obtained; and in another case we find directions being sent in order to meet the difficulties that had been caused by what we in our own time should call a strike of working people. The difficulties are very old, and the world has not yet solved them. It is in the hope that the coming civilisation will solve them that I am drawing your attention again to them to-night. Now even here we have what we call our submerged classes, and those form one-tenth part of the population—a terrible proportion if you come to think of it. Sometimes, when there has been a mutiny in an army, a regiment is drawn up rank after rank, and every tenth man is marked out to be shot while the others go free. That is the condition of our civilisation now—every tenth person is marked out to misery. In India the proportion is even larger. The submerged classes there amount to one-sixth of the population, but, on the other hand, they are not nearly as miserable as are the corresponding classes here: they are more despised, but they are far happier, partly because the belief in which they have grown up, under the thousands of years that lie behind them in that civilisation, has ever been that a man’s condition in the present is due to causes that he himself has set going in the past. So that those people, instead of blaming their neighbours, blame themselves for the discomfort of their own position, and sometimes determine that their next birth shall be a happier one by making the very best they can of the disadvantages here. Then again, poverty there is really not as terrible as here; you read of a famine that sweeps away hundreds of thousands of the people, but is that really so very much more terrible than the continual condition of underfeeding in which our submerged classes live? The Registrar-General does not mark them down “Died of Starvation”—that would be shocking the public taste; but if you look into the matter you will see that when the starved sempstress going home carrying her work is struck by an east wind that whistles through her thin clothing and strikes on her underfed body, she is put down in the report as “Died of pneumonia, bronchitis, or consumption,” but in karma’s record she is marked down “Died of starvation,” for it is the perennial underfeeding that brings about the great mortality among the poor. I need only take a very few cases as examples in order to show you what this poverty means. I have taken them out of casual papers during the last week: from my own experience of the past I know them not to be exaggerated, but these particular cases happen to be going on just now. One of them is the case of the women who sew on cards the hooks and eyes which we buy very cheaply in the shops. Such a woman sews nearly 47,000 hooks and eyes for 1s. 2½d.—a thousand almost per farthing. Think what it means. Naturally she pulls in her children to help her; and so the children, who are obliged to go to school, for we have compulsory education, when they come back from learning their lessons have to sit down and set to work linking the hooks and the eyes together so as to save a little of the mother’s time, and the children, who ought to be playing and building up strong and healthy bodies, are kept there hour after hour preparing the hooks and eyes for which the mother is to receive the princely payment that I have mentioned. Take another case that everybody knows—shirt-making: 1s. a dozen for men’s shirts, and there is a fair amount of work in those; even that is not the lowest depth, for the woman who takes them out to make at 1s. per dozen lets them out again at 8d. per dozen to a woman more miserable than herself. And so the thing goes on, home after home, person after person. This and the preceding case I am taking from the last issue of The Christian Commonwealth. Another case is mentioned there of a woman who had been working along these lines; her particular work, I think, was 5d. per dozen for collars, and find your own thread. She was brought up as a typical case before the Royal Commission. We are always ready to appoint Royal Commissions, but not very much comes out of them after they have taken evidence. She was asked by a Member of Parliament: “How do you and your children live on what you get in this way?” “We don’t live,” was the answer of the woman, and she spoke truly. She worked sometimes twenty hours a day, from six o’clock in the morning till two o’clock next morning, in order to get enough to feed her children and herself. I could go on for hours giving you cases like this, but I only want typical ones, in order that you may realise the conditions in which so many are living while we are comfortable and at ease.

Pass on from that part of this terrible poverty which nothing apparently is able to touch to the next question that links itself very easily to what I have been saying—woman labour in general, and especially in many of the manufacturing industries. When women began to work at mills, and so on, it was looked upon as a good way for the women to add something to the comfort of the home. How has it worked? It has worked to drive down the wages of the men, and make the home more miserable even in money matters than it was before; and then the home has ceased to be a home, for there is no home where the mother leaves the children behind her, and goes out into the mill to earn the pence or the shillings wherewith those children are to be fed. It has been encouraged for the reason that a manufacturer gave very honestly and frankly before another Royal Commission. “Oh,” he said, “I prefer to employ married women because they are more docile.” That is true. The married woman is very much more docile because, when the question of any resistance comes, she thinks of the children who need food in the home. The baby hands are the hands that make her docile; it is the baby fingers feeling her bosom for the milk that will not come that makes the mother’s heart docile, yielding to everything for the sake of the little child. It has only made the complications of the labour market worse; it has only driven the men out to be unemployed in the streets, while they who ought to be mothers in the home are working in the factory instead. So the labour market only becomes more choked, the wages are rendered yet more miserable, and the men are thrown out while the women are employed, though the men cannot take the woman’s place in the home, and take care of the babies and look after the little ones; only a mother can do that, for nature has made mothers for that work, and the father cannot take their place, however gentle and loving he may be. So you get another problem there, hard to solve, difficult to set right, and one that is ever growing more and more pressing for solution, that is ever intensifying the misery of large numbers of the working population.

Pass on, again, from that—you see I am only touching each point—and take a question of national import, the deterioration of the physique of the people who live in our large cities. That has been going on now for generations, and it has been shown very plainly in the lowering standard of height for enlistment in the Army. On the other hand, if you look at the well-to-do classes you will find rather an increase in strength and physique amongst them, especially amongst the women, because these take so much more part in outdoor life than they did in the past, and so you find they are growing taller and stronger, but the great mass of the population is growing shorter and weaker. But it is that great mass of the population from which the majority of your nation comes. They reproduce most rapidly; they are the people who swell the Registrar-General’s returns; from them the future nation is most largely produced; and it is no good to have upper classes strong and vigorous and well-fed if the mass of your population is deteriorating in strength and vigour. There, again, you have one of these pressing problems which it is necessary to answer; for these problems are like the questions of the Sphinx: the Sphinx put the question, and if the man could not answer it, the Sphinx devoured him. And so with these problems in social organisation; the question is put, and the penalty for not answering is to be devoured, and for the civilisation to pass away.

Remedies of sorts are being put forward by doctors and sociologists; sterilisation of the unfit is one of the favourite nostrums or quack remedies of the day. But such remedies are worse than the disease, for they are brutal, and lead to deterioration of morale as well as of physique. You must go down to the root of the causes that make these the unfit, and not bring them forth from the social organisation by the myriad, and then try to find means to check their numbers; and so on that side, again, this insoluble difficulty is facing us.

Even these are not all the problems which are set for us by our Sphinx for which solution is demanded. We have seen terrible poverty, we have seen the question of woman employment, we have seen the question of deterioration of physique and swift multiplication of the unfit: what about the criminal population? We manufacture habitual criminals at a very rapid rate. We take up young men or young women, and we send them to jail for a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years. It goes on accumulating until the habitual offender gets sentences which will outlast his physical life. But that has done nothing to cure the man, that has done nothing to turn him into a good and useful citizen. The law, when it grips him, ought to turn him into a better type of man. Instead of that, he comes back over and over again, until the very habitual criminality that the law has very largely made is brought up as a reason for the magistrate to inflict upon him a heavier penalty. But that is not wisdom; it is folly. Very often a bright, clever lad, full of spirit, falls into crime. It is only one chance in a hundred if he is rescued, and does not gradually drift into the ranks of the habitual criminal. Surely at this stage of civilisation there must be some better way; and there is a better way, as I shall try to show you when I come to deal with brotherhood applied to social life.

If we go beyond these extreme cases, and look at the ordinary questions of supply and demand, of production and distribution, notice how society is gradually coming to a point where things cannot go on as they are, and yet where to change them means the dislocation of our whole productive and distributive system. We can see it best, perhaps, if we go to America, because in America there are not the softening influences which to some extent at least still prevail here, where society was once based on a more human foundation, instead of merely on the question of cash. We see what our systems are if we go over the water to America, where they have full play, without anything to prevent their complete development. There are one or two things that strike us in America of a rather remarkable character. First, the growth of the man who builds his own enormous fortune on the deliberate wrecking of the small fortunes of others. Let me give an example. A large number of people, mostly rather poor, gather together into a company in order to build a railway that is wanted for the development of the country where they are. They want quicker communication, they want better carriage of grain, of goods, and they build a railway. It is working fairly well, it is paying, perhaps not very largely, but still fairly satisfactorily. A much cleverer man than those people comes along, and he sees that that particular district is one that is likely to open up to a very large extent—one where railways will become most valuable property. He sets to work to build another railway that runs over the same ground as the first; it is not wanted except to make him rich. He then begins to destroy the other railway by charging smaller fares and lower freightage; he goes on doing that, putting in his capital, because his rates do not pay, until the other railway is driven down to the impossible level at which he has fixed prices and fares: when the shares of that other railway have sunk down to nearly nothing in the market, he steps in and buys them all up; when he has bought them all up he lets his sham railway go to pieces, and the whole of the district is in his hands, and he piles up an enormous fortune. On the other side of his fortune is the loss to all the shareholders who put their money into that railway in order to improve the means of communication in the place where they were living. They have been sacrificed that he might make enormous wealth. Such men are called “wreckers” in America, but they are honoured in society; they build hospitals, and even churches; they do all kinds of things with fragments of the wealth that they have taken; but I tell you that, although not by the law of the country, yet by the law of righteousness, these men are worse and more to be condemned than the burglar who steals the jewels of a lady or the gold plate of a millionaire. He is punished heavily when he is caught, and he deserves to be punished; burglary is obviously wrong; but worse than that open burglary that the law punishes is the hidden burglary of the brilliant brain against the stupid brain, which robs people of the result of their labour in order to accumulate it within the wrecker’s store.

Other forms of this robbery are what are called “trusts” and “corners.” They have been trying, I see, to make a corner in wheat, and another speculator has been able to checkmate the original speculator by pouring in millions of bushels of wheat. But people are not fed any better whichever speculator wins; it is only a problem as to which of the two should be able to make the largest profits; and then the trusts are built up, whereby a few men are able to make enormous fortunes and kill out all the smaller men. Now our American brethren are getting a little tired of that, and they are trying to find out some way in which they can prevent it—some Act of Congress, some law which should prevent the trust. But what law can you possibly pass to prevent the trust, which is only the natural outcome of competition gone mad? What can you do to prevent that without crippling also every one of your industrial concerns which are based on the same principle of cut-throat competition? There is where the deadlock comes in again. The whole thing is built up on one man fighting against another, one man trying to overreach another, one man trying to make better bargains for himself, no matter what happens to his neighbour—that is the whole method of what we call our commercial system. If that be so, how are you going to interfere with its natural outcome, with the inevitable result which grows out of it?—the same principle, only carried a little to excess, and so shocking the conscience that was not shocked when people were ruined piecemeal, but is shocked when they are ruined by hundreds and by thousands; yet each one of those who were ruined piecemeal suffered as much, his lot was as unfortunate. How, then, can you cripple the excess without undermining the whole? There is another of the problems which are set, and yet in the very midst of it there is a gleam of a brighter future, for in that great alchemy with which the mighty Chemist of the world’s laboratory changes the forces that destroy into forces that construct, there are signs that these trusts which have grown out of the greed and selfishness of men will really be organisations of industry which will be useful to the community in the future, when Brotherhood has replaced competition, and when thought for others takes the place of only thinking for oneself. And so we see possibilities even in the midst of the troubles.

Let us glance at another side of this problem—the attempts which are being made to improve social conditions in newer countries, as they are called, say, Australia. In Australia the working classes have got everything that they are asking for here; it is called the working-man’s paradise. Every boy of twenty-one can vote; think of the magnificent freedom of it! Every girl of twenty-one can vote; what more would you have? No need of agitation there. But, unluckily, the boys care much more about football than they do about questions in Parliament, and the girls, perhaps, are thinking more of bonnets and hats than of the way in which their votes ought to be cast. They have all got the vote and they do not know what to do with it, and that is a very common thing. It does not occur only in Australia. Has it ever struck you that you are paying in happiness for what you call liberty, if you mean by liberty the right to cast a vote? No matter what your qualifications, that is quite outside the question; no matter whether you know anything about the questions, that is not of the least importance; no matter if your head is as empty as ever it can be, it counts just as much at the polling-booth as the head of the wisest statesman, thinker, most highly trained economist or historian. It is an admirable way of governing when you come to look at it from the outside standpoint. Let us see how it works in Australia where they have it: you have not got it yet; you are on the way to it. All these people have votes, and the great majority, as is always the case, are ignorant. There has been class legislation over here, and they have class legislation over there—it is not a good thing, only there it is just the other way up; and the effect of ignorant class legislation is even worse than the effect of educated class legislation. Let us see how it works. First, it works for a gradual diminution of efficiency along the ordinary lines of work, on which, remember, the whole prosperity of the country depends. The boy who is a free man does not care to be an apprentice, and it does not to do tell the boy he has done his work badly, because he is a free Australian, and off he goes, and he won’t work any more if you tell him he has not worked well. But, you know, nature is a very awkward thing to come striking up against in your political and social life, and her laws do not get modified as you might think they should. The boy who won’t learn becomes the workman who is wanting in skill, and so the level of efficiency in production is getting lower and lower. If they want a piece of good machinery they have to send over here to get it—although there is a very heavy price put upon importing it into Australia—because the work there is so badly done that the machines won’t work properly after they are made, and that is one of the results that we are seeing at the present time. Another one is, that unemployment is increasing. There are men in the streets there just as there are here, clamouring for work, and asking the Government to give it to them; and how do they get there? Very many of them because they must not work under a certain wage, which is not a possible wage to pay for the kind of work that they can do. Suppose you happen to have a little garden; you want to have your paths weeded and your grass cut. That is gardener’s work. Now a gardener must not work under 10s. a day, and your poor professional man who is at a discount in the matter of votes, and has a fixed income, cannot afford to pay 10s. a day to have his paths weeded, so he goes to weed them himself, and the would-be gardener goes out, and is unemployed in the streets, and calls on the Government to find him work. There is a very serious side to that beyond the question of unemployment. If you are going to make the men who should give better work to the country than the weeding of paths weed their own paths for themselves, then you are putting a check on the whole of the higher kinds of labour on which the nobler national life depends, for it is as true now as it ever was that man does not live by bread alone. If you are going to make every man do manual labour, you can get nothing more than the kind of paradise that you find in “Looking Backward,” which is more a paradise for the respectable suburb than for a nation that needs art and beauty, music and literature. Those things want leisure to produce and time to perfect. There must be education behind them before they can be produced, and it is a very bad arrangement to press all your nation down to a low level of comfortable eating and drinking and amusement, and forget the mightier things that make a national life—the products of genius, the creative exertions of thought. There is one of the greater dangers. You cannot blame the poor people. ‘As long as a man is hungry, a good meal is the one thing he wants, and that must be his ideal. But nations ought not to be built up on the crude ideas of the ignorant and the hungry. That is the duty of wisdom. But see how difficult this question becomes; see how it is even in this country, where still education is a very great weight in popular affairs, even though the vote ignores it. A man may know his own trade, and be able to give very good counsel and advice as to what is necessary for that one particular trade in which he is working; but a nation is not made up of one trade; it is made up of a hundred different occupations, every one interlinked and interrelated with all the others, and you cannot legislate nationally by simply looking at a single occupation or a single class. You must see how your law reacts on the whole of the complicated organism; otherwise you ruin your nation while you lift up a single trade, and that is what is happening in Australia. Certainly some of the trades are very well provided and arranged for, but the rest of the elements that ought to make a nation are disregarded, and life for them is made impossible; and even within the limits of a trade, sometimes things are marvellously stupid. Let me give you one example. Melbourne is a large city, and occasionally it has very hot weather. The trades unions there have made a law that milk shall not be delivered more than once a day on Sunday; the poor man wants his holiday, and it is very selfish of you if you want to make him work on Sunday, so that milk may only be delivered in the morning. Now the difficulty is that the cows have not yet come into the trades unions; they do not realise that on Sunday they are only to give milk once a day and not twice. Without the slightest regard for the beauty of social arrangements, they wilfully persist in giving milk in the afternoon as well as in the morning. But the unfortunate milkman must not sell it, because if he did he would be turned out of his trade union, and that would mean destruction. So he has to keep it; and if the weather is hot it is not quite so good in the morning, in spite of the boracic acid, as it was the night before. So he mixes up the fresh milk of the morning and the stale milk of the night before, and sells it all as fresh milk: and though you may not discover it in the milk-can, the baby discovers it in the milk-bottle, and the death-rate of the children goes up in the summer because of this admirable arrangement which has been made with regard to the distribution of milk. That is not the way that nations can really be governed; and there are all sorts of restrictions of that kind which constantly come up against you in the home, and make you feel that life is not in any sense free. Things of this sort can only succeed if certain conditions are willingly accepted by all the people who have to work under them, and not when they are imposed for the benefit of a particular trade or an unwilling and reluctant population.

Let us go one step further; we need not go out to Australia now. We have to replace competition by co-operation. You may say that is being very largely done. Certainly very much has been done in co-operative distribution; Lancashire and Yorkshire are full of successful co-operative works. How many are there of co-operative productive works? The idea has been tried a good many times, but it has always broken down for two reasons: first, that in production you want one clear, strong brain which is a despot over the production; you cannot do it by boards and committees and popular votes, and all the rest of it, because in that commercial production there are many things to think of; very swift changes may come about, and the one able man is able to seize the right moment and to lead his affair to success, where divided councils and delay and discussion spell bankruptcy. That is one of the difficulties with regard to this production. There is something still more serious—the want of trust. The people don’t trust each other; they are suspicious of each other. They suspect each other of personal ends, instead of honestly co-operating for the public good. So they change their officers continually, and there is no continuity of policy. That fault of want of trust, want of confidence, imputation of bad motives, is fatal and must remain fatal until people can grow out of it into Brotherhood. At the present time, when one man born among the working classes, as they are called, by ability and skill, eloquence and application, rises into the higher social ranks, his bitterest opponents are to be found in the class which he has quitted; and when he finds, as he must find—because again he strikes up against great natural laws—when he finds that Trafalgar Square remedies are not workable when you come to put them within the four corners of an Act of Parliament, then people call him traitor, deserter, renegade, and the best he can do will not win him trust and confidence. How is that to be dealt with?